Alternatives to Animal Testing in Aquatic Ecotoxicology

Dear Colleagues,

The global increase of human population, and the concomitant rising standards of living, are expected to drive a strong demand for chemicals in the future. Though chemicals provide substantial benefits for societies, its release into the environment may cause severe harm to ecosystems. Thus, a key challenge emerges to the industry that must handle the increase in chemical production in a responsible and sustainable way. A sustainable chemical innovation must then be promoted to ensure the development of products that do not cause harm to the environment throughout their whole life-cycle. Ecotoxicology certainly plays an important role in this process, either by targeting, at early stages of the innovation process, chemical variations that pose lower toxicity to the environment or by establishing safe concentrations of chemicals in order to protect the environment.

The traditional ecotoxicological evaluation of chemicals entails in vivo assays, including animal experimentation, which makes the risk assessment of new chemicals a difficult task, mainly because it raises ethical issues. Indeed, at present most international regulatory frameworks target the 3 R´s policy (reduce, refine, and replace) and discourage the use of animal experimentation. From this perspective, there is the need to develop and validate alternative effective tools and approaches to support environmental hazards and the risk assessment of chemicals.

This Special Issue aims to present studies on diverse biological matrices, including different levels of biological organization, to review and discuss the currently used approaches and developments in the assessment of effects of chemicals on biota without the need to sacrifice and requiring minimum distress, suffering, or pain on the part of organisms (e.g., in silico methods, in vitro testing, read-across, and quantitative structure–activity relationships, among others). It aims to emphasize new and improved methodologies, promoting enhanced animal welfare, for the accurate sampling, detection, and quantification of relevant biological matrices/endpoints to assess the effects of chemicals on organisms. Studies focusing on alterative nonvertebrate organisms, having this approach in mind, are also supported.

Dr. Isabel M. Lopes
Dr. Marcelino Miguel Oliveira
Guest Editors

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• environmental toxicology
• ecological risk assessment
• environmental hazard
• in vitro testing
• nonanimal alternatives
• humane endpoints